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Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Ianinni connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world--the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. The formal evolution of colonial prose narration, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.Read more...

Strange things, occult relations : emblem and narrative in Hans Sloane's Voyage to ... Jamaica --
Fatal latitudes : the poetics of West Indian "improvement" in Mark Catesby's Natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands --
"The itinerant man" : Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's revolution, and the fate of Atlantic cosmopolitanism --
"All the West-Indian weeds" : William Bartram's Travels and the natural history of the Floridas --
Notes on the state of Virginia, the Haitian Revolution, and the return of epistolarity --
The birds of America and the specter of Caribbean accumulation --
Humboldt's Havana.

Responsibility:

Christopher P. Iannini.

Abstract:

Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American LiteratureRead more...

Reviews

Editorial reviews

Publisher Synopsis

Iannini's text is an important, lucidly argued, and gorgeously produced study. It is necessary reading for literary scholars, historians, and art historians of the Atlantic World.--The Americas [A] short, dense, and rewarding series of essays on writers on nature in the lower South and the West Indies. . . . Iannini is to be applauded for showing how [literary nationalism was] both more central to eighteenth-century discourse than has been usually appreciated and also more useful for understanding how modernity was expressed in the Americas.--American Historical Review Fatal Revolutions is a significant contribution . . . in recent studies of the relationship between natural history and literary culture in European colonies in the Americas.--Journal of American History Fatal Revolutions is a book of outstanding scholarship that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in Atlantic history, colonial nature, slavery, and "plants and empires." It is also a beautifully produced volume, sporting numerous striking illustrations that Iannini analyses with acumen and skill.--Archives of Natural History Any reader will enjoy the fresh perspective and the riot of tropical diversity provided by a Caribbean-centric vision of the origins of natural history.--Isis Iannini's Fatal Revolutions points to the critical elisions in a traditional model of American literary history focused on the development of the United States.--American Quarterly An ambitious book that will make path-breaking contributions to the study of early Atlantic literary culture, economy, and society.--New West Indian Guide Iannini skillfully incorporates leading scholarship in early American studies to suggest new directions for an ecocriticism that remains bound within national borders and that takes for granted strict categories of place. Required reading.--Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentRead more...